Ruby DSL (Domain-Specific Language)

Mar 14th, 2015

What is a DSL?

A domain-specific language (DSL) is a computer language specialized to a particular application domain. This is in contrast to a general-purpose language (GPL), which is broadly applicable across domains, and lacks specialized features for a particular domain.

A DSL is like a mini language inside of a language. It’s a specific syntax for describing a domain/area of your application. Think of a DSL like a mini game within a game… like when you were raising/racing Chocobos in Final Fantasy 7. A DSL in Ruby is still written in Ruby, it just provides a nicer interface and language for performing common tasks.

DSL you have seen

You may not have realized it, but if you write Rails applications you most likely work with a variety of DSLs every day. Below are a few examples of some commons ones.

Blocks are Key to DSLs

Knowing how blocks work is crucial to understanding how DSLs work. I think of a block in Ruby as basically just a chunk of code that you can pass around to other methods. If you’re used to writing Javascript you’re definitely comfortable passing around functions, and blocks in Ruby are fairly similar to that.

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double=->(num){num*2}putsdouble.call(2)# 4

Passing Blocks
You’ve most likely used blocks before when calling the each method on an Array, or the collect method.

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[1,2,3].eachdo|item|putsitem*2end# 2, 4, 6

What you are doing is passing the block of code between do and end to the each method of the Array class.

Receiving Blocks
On the recipients side, there are a couple ways to receive the block that was passed. The first way is via the yield keyword in Ruby. yield will call the block of code that was passed to the method. You can even pass variables to the block of code.

There is an alternate way of receiving a block of code that is called a named-block. This essentially allows you to save the block of code to a variable, which gives you the flexibility to pass the block on to another method. If you wish to execute the code inside of the block, you can do so via the call method on it.

Block Context
Normally a block has the context of the place it was instantiated. It is possible to change this, to be the place where it is being called, but to do this instead of doing the usual yield or block.call(), you call it via the instance_eval(&block) method.

Create your own DSL
Create a Ruby DSL to generate HTML. The output was to look like the following, and below is how the DSL should be called. To each HTML element you can pass text, options (html attributes), and a block. All are optional.

The solution I eventually came up with (after some serious refactoring) is below. I used some Ruby meta-programming by not actually defining methods for each HTML element, but rather utilizing method_missing as a catch-all, which then passes the element name, the args, and the block on to the tag method, which does the heavy lifting of generating the HTML.

One other thing I utilized here was that you can also check if a block was actually passed to the method by using the block_given? method.